


Full Bloom

by marshmallons



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Childhood Friends, Eventual Relationships, Friends to Enemies, M/M, Mild Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-02-14
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:55:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22720579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marshmallons/pseuds/marshmallons
Summary: Childhood friends to enemies to friends to lovers.Growing up together sometimes includes growing apart together.Especially when Kaiba falls in love with his childhood best friend.
Relationships: Kaiba Seto/Yami Yuugi | Atem
Comments: 29
Kudos: 53





	1. Chapter 1

Atem lived in the first house on the left hand side of the street that entered into the private residential area. Seto lived in the house right at the end of the lane, on the curve of the street that formed the cul-de-sac.

Atem’s house was warm, painted a shade of orange like the little tangerines that Seto sometimes found in his lunchbox. Flowers grew in brightly-colored pots across the front yard, and a huge tree whose leaves sprawled out over the yard, casting shade down onto the soft green grass where he and Atem liked to lay and stare up at the clear skies for hours after school, until the sun began to disappear behind the roofs of the high, second-story houses. 

Gozaburo’s house was austere white, a shade so clear and unforgiving that it hurt Seto’s eyes to look upon the blinding house whenever the sun shone down on it. The grass in the front yard had been mowed down and replaced with concrete— _gardens are impractical, boy,_ he had said in that gruff voice that didn’t leave room for argument. _They’re a waste of money and a waste of time._

Seto’s head rested on Atem’s lap. His backpack lay abandoned a few feet away, and he was sprawled out on the patch of shaded grass beneath the tree. It was springtime and the tree was in full bloom, dense with new leaves the shade of Atem’s eyes and creamy white flower buds.

Atem carefully placed another baby-blue flower into Seto’s hair. His back was pressed against the coarse bark, but he didn’t complain, and although the grass tickled the bare backs of Seto’s calves, he didn’t complain either.

Seto stared down at his legs in quiet contemplation, observing his knobbly knees and the flash of thighs that peeked out from beneath the hem of his shorts; his skin was pale despite the last few weeks of steady sunshine, and the fresh bruise on his knee was already beginning to take on a distinct purple tone. 

Atem’s skin was warmer— honeyed brown, always rich and warm, no matter the weather— but the bruises and the raw scrapes still flashed on his palms and his skinned knees whenever Seto caught a glimpse of his moving hands or the thighs he was laying between.

“You didn’t have to step in, you know,” he chastised, again. “Your dad’s gonna get mad that you got hurt.”

Atem made an annoyed noise behind him, and this time, when he placed a flower in Seto’s hair, he tugged on a stray strand. “I know. But I wasn’t gonna let them pick on you. You’re not weird.”

“I don’t care if they think I’m weird,” Seto said stubbornly, setting his jaw, even though Atem couldn’t see his expression. “I think they’re stupid.”

Atem laughed. His hands became gentle again. “I think so too.”

Seto tilted his head back and closed his eyes. The sunlight bounced between the gaps in the leaves and danced behind his closed eyelids, tinting the world pink and warming his face. When he opened his eyes again, Atem was looking down at him with a fond smile. 

“I think I know why you’re not growing.” Atem carefully traced a dark circle underneath Seto’s sleepy, half-lidded eyes. “You stay up past your bedtime, huh?”

Seto sighed and pushed his hand away. “Just a little bit. But only because Gozaburo makes me stay up to do homework for my private lessons.”

“You’re already the smartest kid in our class. You’re probably smarter than all the fifth graders too.”

“I know. But Gozaburo wants me to take all those dumb lessons anyway.”

“Your brain is growing faster than the rest of you.” 

Seto sat up, twisting himself around until he could flick Atem’s forehead. “Whatever. You’re not that much taller than me anyway, you know.”

“Am too!”

“Nuh uh.”

“I’m the tallest kid in our class!”

Atem rubbed his sore forehead and Seto softened, giving his friend a fond look. He didn’t apologize, but he kissed the same spot he flicked, thinking nothing of it until Atem stared at him with confused eyes and slightly flushed cheeks. 

Seto settled back into his comfortable position in Atem’s lap, looking up past his face and toward the kaleidoscope of sunlight filtering in through the viridian treetop. 

Gozaburo would be home around the time that the sun disappeared behind the rooftops. The lazy golden hours of the afternoon seemed to stretch out before him without limit, unending, safe and warm in their quiet space beneath the sycamore tree. 

Seto stretched a hand out toward the sky, examining the light that formed a platinum halo around his fingertips, and smiled.

“I’m gonna be tall one day too. You’ll see.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Can you believe I started this almost one entire year ago!? Can you believe I ever stopped writing fanfiction!? The audacity!! 
> 
> I'm still being swallowed by dissertation and school and other projects, but I'm feeling happy again and so excited to come back to this fic! Chapters will be on the short side, but I'm trying to make it work with the _vibe_ and atmosphere of the fic, as well as to keep it low-stress and manageable for yours truly. 
> 
> As ALWAYS, this fic is inspired and dedicated to @nsfwnoses! ❤️


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They’re fourteen and they’re sweaty and uncomfortable and Seto’s knees constantly ache.

It’s always been about the routines shared between them. Seto would stop by Atem’s house in the morning, waiting beside the tree he had come to think of as their tree, and after Atem burst through the front door, often forgetting one thing or another in his excitement, they would walk to school together. 

Atem often filled him in on what he had missed during the few hours they spent apart; a television special that Seto hadn’t been allowed to watch, or the moussaka his mother had made for dinner. Seto would listen with a smile, and hardly had to strain to think of what he could contribute to the conversation; the walk between Atem’s house and their junior high school was short enough that Atem could single-handedly bridge the distance with his own chatter. 

It was only when they reached school that Seto shrank. Despite the years that had passed since the first day that Seto was just the weird new kid, Atem had remained his only friend. It was not uncommon for Seto to follow Atem and linger in his shadow, head down with his hands in his pockets and his shoulders jutting up toward ears that grew faster than the rest of his features, as Atem talked to his friends in the morning, or at break, or at lunch. They were strictly Atem’s friends— Seto was still half a foot shorter than most of them, but four-foot-eleven feet of unapologetic dislike and sarcasm. 

But when it’s just the two of them after school, together like this, another routine of its own, the hackles fall from Seto’s shoulders and he’s calm, even bored in his own contentment. In his boredom, the minutes seem to stretch into hours, his sense of time distorted by the humid heat.

“It’s so hot,” Atem whines, not for the first time. 

His voice is muffled beneath the pillow on his face, but it’s hoarse and scratchy, and Seto thinks it’s strange that he’s getting a cold in the middle of a hellishly hot summer. 

“You’re the one who wanted to come inside,” Seto mutters. 

His shirt sticks to his back and the nape of his neck is uncomfortably sweaty. He’s laying on Atem’s bed, head hanging over the edge of the mattress, and gravity draws his damp bangs off his forehead. His head is beginning to rush, but he’s too lethargic and stubborn to pull himself upright. 

Atem’s head pops into the corner of his vision.

“Do you wanna ride our bikes to the playground?”

“It’s too hot.”

Atem makes a face at him. Upside down, it’s funnier than Seto would normally find it, and he cracks a grin. 

“They should put you on the Notre Dame,” he says, thinking of his vacation to Paris last summer and the ugly gargoyles that lined the exterior of the magnificent gothic church. 

“In the treasury,” Atem shoots back, and Seto laughs.

“More like in the tower with the hunchback!”

Atem narrows his eyes and Seto has only the slightest warning —the tension in Atem’s shoulders, the shift in the mattress beneath him— before Atem shifts, sliding onto the bridge of Seto’s hips and using leverage to jerk him up by the front of his shirt. 

Seto’s head rushes and Atem’s face is a blur in front of his own; he’s dizzy and his gaze is out of focus, but he’s acutely aware of the weight and warmth of Atem in his lap, and when his head stops spinning and he matches Atem’s challenging look with an incredulous one of his own, he notices the flecks of brown in Atem’s green eyes and his heart stutters painfully in a way that it never has before.

Atem shoves at his shoulder and his voice is laced with fond exasperation when he says, “You’re a jerk sometimes, y’know that?”

“I know,” Seto answers reflexively, and he’s still trying to figure out what the hell had just happened. His palms are sweating and his voice is hoarse, betraying him by cracking mid-sentence. “You are too sometimes. Get off me.”

“Sure.”

There’s nothing in Atem’s easy smile that suggests he’s feeling the same strange unease that Seto’s feeling, and something akin to guilt and confusion join in the tangled fray that’s formed in the pit of his stomach. He raises his gaze to Atem’s face and inspects it, searching for the whatever it was that had made him react that way. 

Atem looked no different than usual. His eyes are the same green they were yesterday, and his hair hangs over them the same way it always does. But there’s a new sharpness to his features, angles that weren’t there before, hard edges carved from yesterday’s soft, childlike roundness. He realizes in a moment of astounding clarity that Atem’s voice isn’t scratchy with a cold— his voice is becoming deeper, and it unnerves him. 

He doesn’t register his own face is screwed into a deep-set frown until Atem nudges his shoulder with a nervous laugh.

“Why are you staring at me like that?” 

“Shut up. I’m thinking,” Seto says without thinking, and he realizes he’s desperately searching for a trace of the Atem he grew up with. 

He can’t remember when Atem’s face began to change— he’s not sure he ever noticed that it did. 

“It looks like you’re having a hard time.”

“Very funny,” Seto sighs, and can’t help but think that it’s all more confusing than funny. “I should probably go home.”

Atem’s expression changes immediately. 

“Don’t go home yet,” he protests, as if he won’t see Seto the next morning or the morning after that. “We could go down to the pond, or we can go buy ice cream. Or play soccer! Let’s play soccer!” 

And although it’s more of a puddle in the park than a pond, and ice cream makes Seto’s stomach rumble and ache for hours, and Atem sometimes kicks the ball into the busy street, he finally agrees when Atem takes his hand and pulls him out of bed— and Seto doesn’t let go of his grip until they reach that puddle in the park, ice cream sandwich held tight in the other hand, soccer ball tucked in the crook of his elbow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like this came out awkward and kinda weird but...so is Seto. Let's call it atmosphere.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> for ochi!! ❤️️

They’re in high school, and everything is different. Atem is the star soccer player, revered for his stamina and quick, fancy footwork, and a friendly, popular face among nearly every single social clique across campus. Seto is quiet, asocial, and his time at school is divided between lectures on campus and seminars at the local community college. 

Seto hates the cafeteria. It’s where he feels Atem’s absence most profoundly. A peal of raucous laughter rings out amidst the constant stream of low-level chatter in the room; he doesn’t need to look up to see that it’s Wheeler, captain of the baseball team and Atem’s apparent closest friend. Seto can’t tell whether his disdain is born from resentment, or vice-versa— the constant, nagging stream of thought that Atem had replaced him for _Wheeler_ , of all the obnoxious people to befriend on campus, stings at his pride and he’s left with nothing but a seat at an empty table across the cafeteria, aching with jealousy. 

He walks home alone at six p.m. when the library on campus closes for the evening. Seto rounds the corner and though he has no reason to suspect otherwise, Atem is there, sweaty, hair in disarray, the picture of vibrant youth. Seto’s heart throbs in his chest, and though it may just be his bad posture, he imagines he can feel the reverberating beat painful between his ribs.

Atem looks pleasantly exhausted from the soccer training session, but it doesn’t stop him from flashing a grin that stretches from ear to ear. His cleats dangle from his gym bag and there’s a dark patch of sweat in the center of his back, between the broad planes of his scapulae. He pinches the front of his shirt and pulls it away from his chest, fanning his torso, and Seto catches a glimpse of his tight abdomen and the waistband of his boxers peeking past the stretchy, elastic band of his tiny exercise shorts. 

The sight makes his mouth run dry. He keeps walking without acknowledging him.

“Seto!” 

Atem has to half-heartedly jog after him. Seto towers over him now— he's gaunt, ungainly, and awkwardly hunched over, and the span of his footsteps is twice that of Atem’s. But unlike Seto, he’s in perfect condition, and even with a solid few pounds of gear in his gym bag, he keeps pace alongside him as though it’s easy. 

“I didn’t see you during zero period,” Atem says casually, shifting his bag from one shoulder to the other. 

“It’s Thursday. I take calculus at the community college on Thursdays,” Seto mutters.

He hates that Atem seems to forget each week, no matter how many times he reminds him of it. He hates himself even more for caring.

Atem has the decency to look sheepish. “Oh, that’s right.” 

They walk in silence. Atem wears a serene expression, occasionally pointing out a bug on the path or kicking a discarded plastic bottle down the road for as long as he can. They’ve been doing this for so long that he must mistake the static tension in the air for companionable silence. Seto is quiet, strained and annoyed, the same old tension mounting every single day on loop during their fourteen-minute walk home.

It’s always the same— just as he thinks his frustration is going to bubble over, they reach the sidewalk and Atem waves goodbye with a winsome, good-humored smile and promises to see him again tomorrow. 

Atem throws a wrench in their established routine. His brow crinkles and he looks uncomfortable. Seto can’t remember the last time he had made that face— and thinks, _it’s over now, it’s happening_. His hands clench into fists at his sides. 

“It’s been a while since the last time that we went out together. You know, just the two of us,” Atem starts hesitantly. “I know that I’ve been busy with school and with the team. But why don’t we go out to the arcade together this weekend?” 

Seto stares at him blankly. Then he blinks his way out of his own stupor. 

“The arcade?” he echoes. 

Atem gestures with a nervous laugh. “Or anywhere, really. It doesn’t have to be the arcade if you don’t feel like it. I just thought that since it used to be our favorite place…”

“The arcade is perfect,” Seto hastily cuts in. “The arcade. This weekend.” 

“ _Great,_ ” Atem breathes. “Saturday, okay?”

Seto only nods, and walks away with a quick wave over his shoulder. He can’t bear to watch Atem’s excited smile or the way he pulls off his sweaty shirt as soon as he’s in the comfort of his own lawn. As he walks quickly down the lane, his pulse is thrumming and his head is in a dizzying flurry of thoughts and emotions running wild. He can hardly bring himself to focus on a single one. His excitement is interrupted by a sudden spike of fear when a neighborhood dog charges at the fence, barking— 

_Stupid Pomeranian, he hates that neighbor’s noisy dog—_

—but as soon as he’s inside his bedroom, he collapses into bed and doesn’t get back up until he’s sure that he can stand without feeling weak at the knees. 

* * *

On Friday, Seto is invisible again. Atem sits in the back row in each class they share, and at lunch, he sits again with Wheeler, the captain of the football team, the head of the cheerleading squad, and the universal waterboy. They’re an attractive circle. Seto knows he isn’t the only one who watches them with an unpleasant mixture of longing and envy. 

Between classes, Atem walks in the hallway with Wheeler and the other jock when Wheeler’s backpack clips Seto’s shoulder. He doesn’t turn, hardly even seems to notice, and Seto glares at his back, fuming with six different types of hatred. Atem lifts his eyebrows, smiling apologetically, and spreads his hands in a useless gesture— but it’s the most attention Seto has received from him all day.

He doesn’t answer, and Atem doesn’t mention it on the walk home. 

* * *

Saturday morning passes without word from Atem. Seto rises, folds his bedsheets, and watches Mokuba watching the morning cartoons before he considers making the walk to Atem’s house. The hours roll by and the sun begins to sink around four p.m., which marks the hour when Seto changes from a baby-blue chambray and chinos to cut-off shorts and an oversized KC t-shirt. 

He’s just folded his shirt and tucked away his trousers when the doorbell rings, and his entire body becomes tight. 

He considers not opening the door. He decides on not opening the door. But when he’s stomping down the stairs, the front door is open and Mokuba is grinning from ear to ear.

“You’re not supposed to open the door, Mokuba,” he snaps. It comes out sharper than he had intended and he softens the blow with a muttered, “Stranger-danger.” 

“It’s just Atem! I checked before I opened it,” Mokuba says, sticking out his tongue. 

He walks away quickly, before Seto dives into a lecture, leaving him alone with Atem. Atem’s hair is damp and quickly fluffing, taking its usual shape. The tips have grown red and copper-tinged, warmed by the sun, and the strands that fall over his brow are bleached blond, the product of what was apparently a drunken dare at a party that Seto most certainly was not invited to. 

When Seto continues to stare conspicuously at his drying hair, Atem self-consciously tucks a strand behind his ear and laughs, a touch too forced. 

“I just showered, that’s why it’s wet. We had a game this afternoon...I probably should have mentioned that beforehand,” he explains with a grimace. “At least we still have a few hours before the arcade—”

“I’m not going,” Seto says flatly. Atem’s face immediately falls.

“Come _on_ , Seto,” he pleads. “It’s only four and the arcade closes at eight. That’s more than enough time for us to go out and have fun for a while.”

“I’ve already changed and I don’t want to get dressed all over again…”

“You look good the way you are already!” 

Seto hates that he wishes Atem meant that. He hates even more that one look at Atem’s earnest expression makes him roll his eyes and agree to go.

The arcade smells like rusted pennies and pizza and deep-fried snacks. A heady loop of catchy pop tunes plays over the intercom and there’s the electric whirring of ticket machines and jingling tokens and the occasional disgruntled shout of a sore loser. It’s a familiar atmosphere and Seto underestimates how happy he is to be there.

“You’re smiling,” Atem teases, and his own eyes are wide, sparkling and reflecting the tacky neon lights in their liquid depths. 

“Shut up,” he says self-consciously, but he _is_. 

He smiles as they walk together to the monster-hunting arcade game— and his smile falls when he sees a familiar group already standing by the machine. A pool of dread and disappointment forms in the pit of his stomach.

“Atem—”

“ _Atem!_ ”

Wheeler tackles Atem and Seto wonders how the hell he doesn’t hit the ground. Atem stands surprisingly upright, and laughs, clapping a hand on his shoulder. 

“Atem, it’s good to see you! Come on, you’ve gotta check out this game!”

Seto stands cast to the side as if he doesn’t exist. Atem’s gaze flickers over to him and he holds up a hand to put a pause on Wheeler’s steady stream of gibberish, the majority of it unintelligible to Seto.

“Joey, I came with a friend,” Atem says apologetically, and Seto hates that Atem has to apologize for him, bites his tongue to keep from spitting out that he’ll _leave, coming here was a stupid idea anyway_. 

“Oh.” 

Up close, Seto can see that Wheeler’s eyes are honey-colored and filled with derision. 

“You won’t mind if we interrupt your date for a while, right? Atem’s the only one of us who knows how to get a whole bunch of tickets and Anzu really wants that giant teddy bear.” 

“It’s _not_ a date,” Seto says sharply, at the same time that Atem laughs it off with, “We’re just friends. Seto’s like a brother to me.”

“Ah,” Wheeler says, and it sounds condescending. His gaze flicks over to Seto and Seto wants to spit at his feet. “Is that so?”

Atem shrugs and grabs Wheeler by the elbow. “Come on, I’ll get Anzu that bear. But afterward I’m spending time with Seto.”

Seto watches him steer Wheeler in the opposite direction. He only looks over his shoulder to mouth a quick _sorry_ over his shoulder, and Seto turns away, strangely ashamed and guilty— and angry at himself for a reason he can’t explain.

His earlier nostalgia and excitement are fully dissipated. The smell of greasy fried foods now makes him queasy and the disruptive cacophony makes his head pound. 

Seto disjointedly finds his way in an empty photo booth and sits on the tiny plastic stool, placing his head into his hands. His face feels hot and when he thinks of Wheeler, he burns beneath the skin.

 _Seto’s like a brother to me._ The words make his stomach turn. Even worse, he can’t blame Wheeler for his suspicions. Seto knows how it must look— he’s the _nobody_ who shows up with Atem at the hottest spot in town for teenage dates. It looks like Atem is covering up his existence for a reason, and maybe he is, but not for the reason that Wheeler seems to think.

It looks _queer._ His only solace is that they wouldn’t think someone like _Atem_ was like that. _Like him._

Seto’s chest feels tight. The look on Wheeler’s face had made him want to fight or flee. Ushio had a similar gleam in his eye when he boxed Seto’s last baby tooth out of his mouth in the fourth grade. 

He runs his tongue over the flat edge of his back molar, remembering the taste of blood, and rubs his fists into his eyes until phosphenes dance behind his closed lids. He doesn’t hear when Atem opens the curtain and jumps when a hand touches the side of his arm. 

“I’m really sorry—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Seto interrupts. “It doesn’t matter.”

“We’re in a photo booth. Why don’t we take some pictures together?” 

Atem is placing tokens into the coin slot before Seto could protest. 

“Wait…”

The camera flash goes off before Seto is ready. His eyes are closed, he’s sure of it, he thinks in desperation, and Atem laughs beside him. 

“No!”

Seto covers his face with his hands in time for the next flash of the unflattering lightsource in the center of the booth. 

“Come on, Seto!”

He reluctantly peels his hands away from his face and gives the camera a sullen look. In the small screen in the center of the console, he sees their mirrored image. Atem looks delighted.

“Last picture!”

He isn’t ready when Atem leans in to kiss his cheek. He hardly registers when the camera flashes— he’s looking to the side, startled that Atem is so close, unable to think anything past the litany of _holy shit_ playing like a broken record in his mind. 

Atem draws away without saying a word. Seto watches him step out of the booth to retrieve their photo prints, and sags against the wall when he’s alone. He raises a hand to his chest without thinking; his breathing is shallow and excited, and when he sees himself in the now-black camera screen, wide-eyed and slack-jawed, he glares at himself. 

“It printed two copies!”

At the sound of Atem’s voice, he drops his hands to his sides and masks his expression, pulling a blank face, before he steps out of the booth to rejoin him. 

“I think they came out nice!” Atem says, handing him a copy of his own. “The first one is just a little blurry.”

Seto stares down at the four-inch strip of photos and his gaze lingers on the fourth picture. He can’t name the emotion that swells in his chest, but it’s dangerous, it’s private, it’s something to examine ( _or repress_ —) anywhere other than here. He carefully places it in his pocket. 

“Do you still want to play Monster Hunter? Or that new monster dueling game?”

“I’m actually pretty tired already,” Seto lies. “I should get going.” 

The photo in his pocket burns a hole right down to his thigh. He discreetly sticks a hand in his pocket and traces the edge of the picture with his thumb. 

“Just one match?”

“Okay, just one match.”

They play six matches. Seto grunts in frustration and slaps his hand down on the console when he loses again, gritting his teeth and demanding _best ten out of twenty_ , as if that gives him a fighting chance of winning, when the intercom announces that the arcade closes in ten minutes. 

_Don’t be a sore loser_ , Atem chides, and though he is, Seto is grinning when they walk out of the arcade together, hands in their pockets, loose arcade tokens jingling in Atem’s with every footstep.

Seto feels warm, flushed, and though he blames it on the temperate summer night, it has more to do with the way that the streetlights refract on Atem’s teeth when he tosses his head back and laughs, and the happy spark that starts at his lips and reaches his eyes when he smiles.

“Maybe one day you’ll have better luck,” Atem teases, and Seto draws his hand out of his pocket to punch his shoulder. 

His photograph falls from his pocket. Seto turns around sharply, but there’s a hand already reaching for it before he could bend over. Wheeler picks up the picture from the floor and looks at it for one moment, two, _an eternity_ , before he hands it back to Seto. 

Seto snatches the photograph from his hand and jams it into his pocket, squeezing it tight in his fist, no longer caring if it tore. 

“See ya on Monday, ‘Tem!” Wheeler calls over his shoulder, ignoring Seto. “By the way, Anzu wanted me to remind ya we have a geography quiz on Tuesday!”

“I’ll remember. Goodbye, Joey!”

Atem insists that they linger together in the parking lot until Wheeler drives off in a beaten-up Oldsmobile from the eighties. Only then do they walk home, Atem chirping away about the stars and the weather and newest games at the arcade. Seto walks with his shoulders hunched to his ears, tense, untalkative. His mind is racing, running through a hundred scenarios, each more unlikely than the last. 

_Wheeler will out Atem._

_It’s all a lie, it’s not true anyway, Atem isn’t—_

_—Wheeler has a big mouth._

_But they’re friends._

_Atem has nothing to hide._

Atem is oblivious to his turmoil. 

_Always_ oblivious. 

When they reach their neighborhood, Seto doesn’t pause to linger by Atem’s door. He doesn’t look over his shoulder when Atem calls out _goodnight_ , and he certainly doesn’t say it back. 

He walks swiftly, moving quicker and quicker the further he walks away from Atem’s house, until he’s sprinting down the middle of the street, feet pounding heavily on the pavement, vision swarming and distorted, and he doesn’t care when the neighbor’s dog charges at the fence and growls. He collapses against his front door, winded, panting, unable to catch a single breath, and his oversized shirt feels two sizes too small, but it’s not the shirt, it’s his ribs and his body and everything about him that just doesn’t seem to fit right anymore. 

He doesn’t know how long he stands there, braced against the door, greedily sucking in air like a man deprived, but the lights are off in the house when he steps inside and he’s careful not to make a sound as he makes his way up the creaky steps. 

Inside his bedroom, Seto strips out of his clothing and crumples them into a ball, forcing them into his bureau. As he lays in bed, he closes his eyes and refuses to think of the photograph he leaves in the front pocket of his shorts, now in the very back of his bottom drawer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> they’re not enemies yet...the friends to enemies part is still coming up...


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another dream. Four dreams in a row, where Seto was burned, about to burn, or still on fire. 
> 
> AKA, Siken-esque dream fuckery.

Seto dreams of _the_ memory again. It begins the same, every night. 

He and Atem were on the playground at the elementary school. He hasn’t set foot there in years, but the dream is lifelike, vivid, right down to the rubber matting that scraped his knees raw when he fell and shiny patches of silver in the jungle gym where the blue lacquer had rubbed off after years of wear. 

Seto was only nine. It was the year he won the spelling bee, and it was the year Atem had broken his wrist and let him sign his name onto his glow-in-the-dark cast with a blue permanent marker. He and Atem had laughed for weeks when the cast was taken off and his left forearm was thinner and weaker than the right. Seto remembers, because Atem’s arm looked pitifully small when he threw a punch at Ushio’s nose.

Ushio started it. Seto had grown an inch or two the summer before school started and he had gone to the same elementary school for four years straight, but he could never outgrow the social memory of being the scrawny new kid. When Ushio approached, sneering down at them where he and Atem were sitting on the hot blacktop, trading monster cards, Seto glared and Atem ignored him, until Ushio swung a heavy leg at the pile of cards stacked between them, sending the cards flying, scattering in every direction, and lobbing an untied sneaker directly at Seto’s face. 

Seto’s hands flew to his face. His nose stung and he had the strangest urge to sneeze, but his eyes watered and blurred, and something molten and violent burned underneath his skin when he focused his vision on the sight of Ushio’s unlaced sneaker between his crossed legs. Blood pooled between his fingers, dripping from his cupped palms, and he watched one fat drop form a round, deep red blot on the cards. He lunged at Ushio. Ushio's split lip left streaks of blood on his knuckles that mixed with his own.

In his dream, he doesn’t live through the shame of wiping his bloodied hands on his pants and picking up the cards one by one without saying a word, swallowing past the foul taste of mucus and blood in his mouth while Atem stands up and cuts his knuckles open on Ushio's front teeth. In his dream, he doesn’t resign himself to the unspoken knowledge that Gozaburo would deliver something much worse than Ushio’s humiliation if he returned home with a notice for fighting on school property.

(Nevermind that when Ushio boxed in his face at the end of the year and Seto choked on the molar he knocked loose, Gozaburo spat in his face and called him a coward. Seto flicked his tongue over the hole in his mouth and chanted coward, coward, coward. Cowardice tasted like missing teeth.)

Then he was sitting on a brown, faux-leather bus seat. The window pane rattled beside his ear and the sun burned hot through the thick, plastic window. It was the end of the school year and the weather was beginning to turn, from balmy spring days that saw clover and dandelions growing in the fields next to the playground, to hot days that smelled like sweat and spoiled lunch and promised summer. 

The promise of summer wasn’t enough to keep Atem from catching the flu just before the class field trip. 

The seat beside Seto was empty. This was years before Atem took to sitting with the popular kids, before he was a popular kid himself. This was when he sat beside Seto in every class and on every bus. Atem’s absence was strange then —it’s not so strange now— and the short ride to the local art museum was joyless. They had been looking forward to the class trip for weeks. It was a day out of class, a day to wear jeans with their uniform shirts instead of the usual navy pants and khakis, and to try to ride in the back of the bus, where Atem would sneak his DS out of his backpack and they would take turns hiding it from the chaperones. Seto thought of Atem, imagined him tucked in bed, playing video games alone and practicing new monster card strategies, and learned that rejection felt the same as envy.

Seto dragged his feet through the museum corridors. He had broken away from the crowd of students early on and wandered through the galleries alone. Art made of glass, art made of paint, art made of trash, art made of nothing. It all made him think of the kindergarten art projects he shoved into the bottom of his backpack and threw out without ever showing Gozaburo. It all meant nothing.

Until he looked over his shoulder and his gaze landed on a complicated sculpture. Carved from styrofoam and painted to resemble marble, the details were lost in the material. But looking at it, Seto felt his heart beginning to race. His stomach twisted inexplicably. Two men intertwined. One cupped the face of the other. Modern love, old as time itself. The words on the shiny gold placard didn’t make sense. Seto read it over and over, palms sweating, unable to explain it made him feel sick, why it made him feel nervous, why he had the same feeling in his stomach that he did the time he and Atem drank an entire Redbull and threw up in the bushes behind Atem's house after racing their bikes. 

He couldn’t tear his eyes away. He didn’t hear the teacher calling his name, tuned out the sound of twenty fifth-graders heading in his direction. He was alone with the sculpture, sick and vulnerable, until the hall erupted with the sound of a fifth grade class on a field trip rioting, laughing, jeering. Seto’s attention was violently ripped away from the sculpture. 

“Is that two guys?” 

Seto flinched away from the litany of fake gagging and derision. His same, earlier revelation was echoed with disgust. It mocked him. He balled his hands into fists and shoved them in his pockets, glared at his teacher for silencing them. _They’re in an art museum, it’s a quiet place where they use quiet voices._ She said nothing about the sculpture. 

Seto looked over his shoulder as they walked toward the exits, returning to the bus that would take them back to the elementary schools that smelled like old carpet and urine. The sculpture remained burned into his vision: how the bodies touched, intertwined. The hand on the cheek, the serene, smiling faces. It looked lonely in the exhibition. No paintings surrounded it. The farther away he walked, the smaller it looked, and buried beneath the hot shame and discomfort he couldn’t explain, something deep inside him ached, as raw and empty as the spot in his mouth where his tooth was missing. 

On the bus, he couldn’t ignore the snickers and whispers. Boys moaned in high voices, pairs of friends pretending to grind and hump one another. Hands mocking, jeering, touching faces and caressing, before shoving one another away, shouting _gay!_

Seto sat rigid, face hot. His palms were slick with sweat and grew damp no matter how many times he wiped them on the legs of his pants. His entire face felt clammy, stomach hot and tied in knots. He had the horrible sensation of burning behind his eyelids. He was burning from the inside out. 

Atem stayed home sick, he thought uneasily. Maybe he caught whatever Atem had. 

Thinking about Atem only made him feel worse. When the bus came to a stop in front of a railroad crossing, he threw up into the aisle. 

The dream changes again, and Seto’s no longer in the fifth grade, and neither is Atem. He stands in front of Seto as he is now, athletic, handsomely filling out. He wears the sleeveless, cut-out tank tops he wears when he goes out to run, and it’s damp with sweat. Seto looks at himself and sees his look of disgust, a scowl and a furrowed brow, and he _remembers_. Atem laughs and pulls him into a tight hug goodbye, and he remembers the hard planes of his stomach and the strength behind those deceptively wiry arms. He smelled like natural sweat and musk and a faint trace of whatever cologne he put on that morning, and Seto knew, _knows_ that he held on longer than appropriate, and remembers how he couldn’t bring himself to just let go. 

Seto follows himself. He watches himself walk stiffly down the endless stretch of street between Gozaburo’s house and Atem’s. He remembers the chafe of his zipper and the heat in his face, the astute embarrassment that it’s the first time he’s ever felt _that_ , and the absolute mortification that he’s erect after hugging his only friend. 

He closes his eyes and doesn’t want to see himself. He doesn’t need to keep his eyes open to know that he undoes the tight zipper of his pants as he walks up the steps, and sags against the door of his bedroom after he clumsily locks it behind himself.

Seto wakes up just before his hand reaches into his pants. 

He wakes up hot, covered in his own sweat and tangled in damp bedsheets that he angrily kicks off. His cock pulses hard, _aches_ in his briefs, and Seto grits his jaw, focusing on the individual grains in the popcorn ceiling. He refuses to touch himself, lying in bed ramrod straight until it passes. 

Another dream. Four nights in a row, three dreams where he was burned or about to burn. It feels like he’s on fire. He runs a hand over his face, sighing heavily, and lays listlessly in bed, listening to the sound of blood rushing in his ears and his own uneven breathing. He’s overwhelmingly aware of his own skin and the sensations surrounding him: the brush of his hair at his temples, the bedding caught around his legs, his clothing and the friction on his skin. His fingers curl on the edge of his pillow. 

He can’t even remember the faces of the sculptures at the museum. It was so long ago, and yet the memory haunts him, lingering in the background of his subconscious. It’s as embedded into him as the physical memory of the phantom tooth. Without thinking, he raises a hand to his mouth, touching his fingers to the seam of his lips and rubbing his thumb against his narrow lower lip until it parts. 

Seto traces his front teeth with his index finger. The surface is smooth and flat, the edges and points of his teeth sharp and uneven. He runs his tongue over the flat of his molar. The tooth had long since grown in, but he remembers the sensation of his tongue finding that hollow and rubbing into his gums over and over, working at the empty space like a fixation.

He closes his eyes and presses two fingers into his mouth, skimming the soft, wet inside of his lips and the sensitive spot behind his lower teeth, and drums his fingers against his palate, shuddering violently when the sensation _tickles_ and makes him run his tongue over the roof of his mouth over and over until the sensitivity is near-painful. 

When he touches his tongue, slippery and strange between his fingers, a moan slips through involuntarily. 

He presses two fingers down onto his tongue, hazily thinks, _the hypoglossal nerve_ , curling his tongue around his fingers and pushes them deeper, licking the taste of salt from his own skin. All he can hear is the awful, slick squelch of his tongue sliding between his fingers, the sound of his own shallow breathing, a wet gag when he sucks and his tongue pulses tight around his fingers.

Drool dribbles down his fingers and he can feel it on his chin and the palm of his hand, dripping down to the inside of his wrist. His fingertips graze the pocket of his cheek and the skin there is soft, _so soft_ and smooth, and he thinks of the gesture teenage girls make in hallways at school, holding a fist to one cheek and popping their tongue into the other. His face grows hot and suddenly he can’t breathe. 

_What the hell are you doing?_

The thought is unwelcome, piercing through the fog in his skull. He can’t get his fingers out of his mouth fast enough and lays panting, swallowing thickly, feeling the ghost of them rolling against his tongue. The question rings in his head, over and over. _What the hell was that?_ There is no rational explanation for what he was doing. 

Disgusted, he wipes his wet fingers on the leg of his pajama pants— and freezes when he realizes that he’s hard again. 

“Sick freak,” he mutters under his breath, stomach twisting. Seto stares at the distended crotch of his pants, lip curled, and anger rises to replace the tension coiled in his stomach, whatever it was that he had felt. His mouth tastes sour. “What the hell were you doing?”

He flicks the roof of his mouth with his tongue and shudders. He’ll never do that, whatever it was, again.

Slowly, his pulse returns to normal, but the nausea lingers, the taste of bile heavy on the back on his tongue, and the fear that if he closes his eyes, he’ll remember the feeling of his fingers in his mouth and that unnamed heat in his stomach when Atem held him close and he breathed in the scent of sweat and cologne, boyish, on the cusp of manhood. Atem had never felt so close or so far.

He’s grounded by the sound of his alarm. It’s 8:30. Saturday. Gozaburo returns from his business trip at nine sharp. He’s wasted an entire morning on nonsense. Every disciplined bone in his body screams.

Seto stands and opens the window, looking out into the cool spring morning. He hangs his head over the sill, breathing in deep and slow, and pushes all remaining thoughts of missing molars and art museums to the back of his mind.

When he raises his head, he sees Atem at a distance. He’s a blip at the end of the lane, dressed in a tank top and exercise shorts. His navy gym bag hangs over his shoulder. Seto cups his face in his hand and stares. The feeling gnawing at his stomach is hunger, he denies. Nothing more, and nothing less.

But when Atem pauses and waves at him unexpectedly, the feeling intensifies, flutters, and even though Atem is too far away to see it, he smiles when he waves and thinks _oh no, it’s something more than hunger._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I’m still burnt out and don’t remember how to write, but it's getting better these days. To the readers who have stuck around this long, thank you ♥

**Author's Note:**

> Please let me know what you think! ❤️


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